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Tim Graham is Executive Editor of NewsBusters and is the Media Research Center’s Director of Media Analysis. His career at the MRC began in February 1989 as associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly newsletter of the MRC before the Internet era.

Graham is a regular talk-radio and television spokesman for the MRC and has made television appearances on MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and the Fox Business Channel. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, National Review, and other publications.

Graham left the MRC to serve in 2001and 2002 as White House Correspondent for World, a national weekly Christian news magazine. He returned in 2003. Before joining the MRC, Graham served as press secretary for the campaign of U.S. Rep. Jack Buechner (R-Mo.) in 1988, and in 1987, he served as editor of Organization Trends, a monthly newsletter on philanthropy and politics by the Washington-based Capital Research Center.

Here’s one obvious sign that we live in a profane world. Fifty Shades of Grey, the “mommy-porn” book turned into a movie, complete with its whips and chains and erotic punishment, debuted to far less controversy than The Passion of the Christ in 2004.

The media toasted Fifty Shades as the biggest February movie opening weekend ever at $83.8 million, just a shade more than The Passion. But Mel Gibson’s Jesus film debuted on Ash Wednesday, not on Friday. According to BoxOfficeMojo.com, in its first five days, The Passion grossed $125.5 million; Fifty Shades stood at $98.5 million. It received a lousy C-plus CinemaScore from audiences, so its ticket sales may begin to trail off.

People magazine featured HBO star Lena Dunham in its half-page feature “Why I Care: Personal Stories About Giving Back.” The headline in the March 2 issue was “The Girls creator, 28, supports access to birth control and reproductive rights.”

Dunham, naturally is “giving back” to the abortion industry. A photo caption read “Dunham, who hosted a Planned Parenthood event in January, says she feels ‘compelled’ to help.” At the bottom of the article, People helpfully instructs: “For more information, go to plannedparenthood.org”. The article was basically an advertisement

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki is moving back to the White House to be Communications Director. It’s easy to report on that in passing, with the expected praise-prose from the president that moves the brief story along. But Washington Post reporterJuliet Eilperin couldn’t keep from boosting Psaki, insisting twice she was “well-liked” by reporters. She's "respected," "trusted," "vital," "responsive," and "helpful."

There was no space for chronicling any gaffes or mistakes or tough exchanges at the podium, just space for how she’s liked and respected:

The New York Times Magazine for Sunday carries an article by acclaimed novelist (and Columbia University professor) Gary Shteyngart. The Russian-born writer was hired by the Times for a media-watching stunt: “For the next week, I will subsist almost entirely on a diet of state-controlled Russian television, piped in from three Apple laptops onto three 55-inch Samsung monitors in a room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan.” A sardonic caption describes the writer's "captivity" in the luxury hotel.

He mocked former Rep. Michelle Bachmann by describing her as "roughly equivalent" to clownish Russian "ultranationalist" politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

Although a Texas judge issuing an injunction against Obama’s “executive action” on illegal immigrants came late Monday, national newspapers all put that ruling on the front page on Wednesday. Some headlines buried the judge. USA Today had “Obama immigration plan blocked.” The Wall Street Journal ran with “Obama Dealt Setback on Immigration.” None of the headlines mentioned “illegal” immigrants.

USA Today’s entire nine-paragraph story avoided the “I-word,” using “undocumented immigrants” four times, and “migrants” once. NPR scrubbed the word "illegal" in favor of "unauthorized" immigrants.

The safest bet you can possibly make at the beginning of a presidential election cycle is that the “objective” national media will savage the Republican contenders with “investigative” journalism. Not just one Republican contender, but all the Republican contenders.

It’s a bit amazing to look back at 2012 and remember that every Republican candidate was punched in the kisser by “journalism” if and when he or she inched into the lead. Sarah Palin never declared, but she was slimed in 2011 by NBC star Savannah Guthrie, who casually tossed out author Joe McGinniss’s claims that she was a bad mother, that she and her husband used cocaine, and she had sex with an NBA star. Proof? Who needs it?

“During a CNN internal town hall Tuesday, network chief Jeff Zucker said it’s not a conflict of interest for an executive of the network to host the president and First Lady in their home,” an insider familiar with the event told TheWrap.com.

The fuss was apparently over a dinner with the Obamas at the home of CNN vice president Virginia Moseley, who's married to Thomas Nides, a former aide to Hillary Clinton at the State Department.

Fox News host Greta Van Susteren expressed outrage on Monday that The New York Times couldn’t put the massacre of 21 Christians in Libya on the front page of the paper. It came on A-6, under the headline “Islamic State Video Shows Beheadings of Egyptian Christians in Libya.”

On her Fox website, she wrote: “Something is seriously wrong with The New York Times... 21 Christians beheaded by ISIS in Libya and it is NOT page A1 in my New York Times edition — but buried on page A6. How could the beheading of 21 Christians not be front page?” She also took it to her TV show:

CNN’s Brian Stelter reports “Jose Antonio Vargas, a journalist and undocumented immigrant, is joining forces with the Los Angeles Times to create a new section of the Times web site devoted to race, immigration and multiculturalism.”

In other words, the Times seems to be creating a lobbying site for illegal immigrants, headed by an illegal immigrant and amnesty lobbyist.

On CNN’s Reliable Sources on Sunday, host Brian Stelter brought on leftist comedian (and former Current TV host) John Fugelsang to discuss the legacy of Jon Stewart. Fugelsang suggested that America is dominated by liberals, but some don’t want to admit it.

To be precise, Fugelsang claimed a 2012 Gallup poll on abortion made his case for him that 77 percent of Americans are pro-choice:

Last July, we reported that NPR talk-show host Diane Rehm helped her husband John commit suicide by choosing not to eat or drink, then agitated for “right to die” laws in an NBC News story, where she suggested we euthanize “little animals,” so why not our family members?

Rehm’s crusade made the front page of Sunday’s Washington Post, under the headline “Rehm’s topic: Death with self-determination.” Online it was “NPR host Diane Rehm emerges as a key force in the right-to-die debate.” The words “assisted suicide” were missing on purpose

A team of Washington Post reporters did more myth-busting in the claims of Brian Williams in a Sunday front-page story that continued to two whole pages inside the paper. The headline was “Williams undone by his gift of storytelling: Anchor’s love of a good yarn played a role in his downfall.” Wild exaggerations? “That’s Brian being Brian” was the “newsroom shorthand.”

Reporters Manuel Roig-Franzia, Scott Higham, and Amy Brittain forwarded supportive statements from former NBC chief executive Bob Wright, but also added more rebuttal of Williams tall tales, like one we suggested on NewsBusters about Slim Jims:

T. Becket Adams at The Washington Examiner drew up a list of people shocked, shocked, that Scott Walker punted on a “gotcha” evolution question at a London Q&A.

Adams noted that these same liberal journalists don’t blink when liberal politicians punt on gotcha abortion questions. Conservatives are "climate deniers" or Darwin deniers, but when liberals are baby deniers? The media can only laugh along with them when that hardly tricky matter of science comes up.

At 56, Madonna is still trying to sound like Public Sexpot No. 1 and still trying to rattle the cages of her Catholic upbringing – literally, by suggesting the Catholics oppressed and abused her.

Billboard magazine interviewed her about her latest, soon-to-be-forgotten disc, Rebel Heart. She claimed "Catholicism feels like my alma mater. It's the school I used to go to, and I can go back any time I want and take whatever I want from it because I suffered all the oppression, and all the abuse..."

“Reverend” Al Sharpton isn’t too big on the Bible, certainly not on the tale that God created the world and everything in it. MSNBC tweeted out Sharpton’s Thursday night segment where he wished his viewers and guests “Happy Darwin Day” three times, and mocked Gov. Scott Walker for skipping an evolution question in a London interview.

A snarky commenter on MSNBC.com noted that Sharpton was pushing Darwin, whose book The Origin of Species was also titled The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Uh-oh, Rev.

That Brian Williams six-month suspension has fallen flat. His critics aren't mollified. His supporters are clearly dispirited. Everyone knows this one is not over -- though his tenure at NBC may very well be done.

The suspension isn't going to work for the same reason his apology went nowhere. It resolves nothing.

NPR’s All Things Considered was surprisingly honest on Wednesday night about Jon Stewart’s departure from The Daily Show. Stewart was credited for “influencing the way a generation of young people, especially liberals, view the news and politics.”

Correspondent Don Gonyea admitted the president of the College Democrats “sees Jon Stewart as being on her side” and cited research that shows Stewart’s audience is overwhelmingly liberal.

Over the years, the hip music critics have easily mocked the Grammy Awards for rewarding kitschy music. See: Milli Vanilli, Best New Artist. Oops. But that doesn’t mean Kanye West gets to declare himself the new dean of the rock critics like Robert Christgau.

Kanye threatened to storm on stage and take the Album of the Year award away from Beck and give it to Beyonce. Washington Post music critic Chris Richards actually applauded West’s antics on Thursday. His trash talk is apparently a treasure.

The Washington Post published a 2,223-word story on Thursday's front page on the college career of Scott Walker -- it ended abruptly without a graduation. One obvious question: when did the Post publish a long story on candidate Barack Obama’s undergraduate college years before he was elected in 2008? The answer: They didn’t.

Obama attended Occidental College in California for two years and earned his degree in the Ivy League at Columbia University in New York City. But that apparently wasn't considered newsworthy.

A Nexis search of Obama and “Occidental” found one mention in a Sunday Outlook piece in 2007 and one mention in 2008. On February 11, 2007, it came up in a Sunday Outlook section piece titled “A Rusty Toyota, a Mean Jump Shot, Good Ears.” Occidental’s basketball coach Mike Zinn was quoted as saying “Barry was the same in victory or defeat -- even-tempered. You could sense that the sport and competition were important, but once the season was over, it was time to focus again on academic issues.”

In 2008, it was a gushy story by Post reporter Kevin Merida on August 25, the first day of the Democratic convention. The headline was “A Place in Between; In a Nation Where Race Has Long Carried Polarizing Implications, the Mixed Parentage Of Barack Obama Opens a Bridge to Changes in Our Language -- and Thinking.”

But Merida – now the paper’s managing editor – didn’t do any reporting on Obama’s college years. He merely quoted from Obama’s memoir.

In "Dreams From My Father," Obama poses the question that would hover over his post-adolescent life: "Where did I belong?" He was two years from graduation at Columbia University and felt "like a drunk coming out of a long, painful binge," he writes, with no idea what he was going to do with his future or even where he would live. He had put Hawaii in the rear-view mirror and could no longer imagine settling there. Africa? It was too late to claim his father's native land as his own.

"And if I had come to understand myself as a black American, and was understood as such, that understanding remained unanchored to place," Obama writes. "What I needed was a community, I realized, a community that cut deeper than the common despair that black friends and I shared when reading the latest crime statistics, or the high fives I might exchange on the a basketball court. A place where I could put down stakes and test my commitments."

In searching for a place to anchor, Obama transferred from Occidental College in Los Angeles to Columbia in New York, a period of his life that has not been well-examined. "I figured that if there weren't any more black students at Columbia than there were at Oxy, I'd at least be in the heart of a true city, with black neighborhoods in close proximity."

Obama writes that he was more like black students who had grown up in the suburbs, "kids whose parents had already paid the price of escape." Except he had not grown up in Compton or Watts, he points out, and had nothing to escape "except my own inner doubt."

The same thing happens when you search for Obama within 20 words of “Columbia University.”

On December 27, 2007, Merida glossed over it in a Jesse Jackson passage: “Obama was a recent graduate of Columbia University when Jackson launched his first campaign, and once told Jackson that he was inspired watching him on television debating Walter Mondale and Gary Hart. Now, Obama is trying to carve out a legacy of his own.”

There’s Merida in August of 2008, and then on October 17, 2008, there was a fleeting mention of Columbia, in an Eli Saslow story on Obama’s taste for solitude: “He had always guarded his space, once living in such seclusion as a student at Columbia University that when his mother visited his barren New York apartment, she chastised him for being ‘monklike.’”

After the election, there was more of the same on the editorial page on December 14, 2008 in a David Ignatius column:

Barack Obama wrote in "Dreams From My Father" of his days as a student at Occidental College, groping for his political identity: "We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Frantz Fanon, Eurocentrism and patriarchy."

Don’t you think the voters would have liked to know if young Obama was into terrorist-inspiring thinkers like Frantz Fanon and had a radical anti-Western problem with “Eurocentrism and patriarchy?” Ignatius thought exploring that passage is "silly." No one needs to know what Obama thought in 1981! (But the Post thinks you need to know Romney cut a kid's hair on the quad in 1965.)

PS: The Post had a little more interest in the “Harvard Law School” part of his resume, mostly as a sign of Obama’s belonging in the elite. Post political reporter Chris Cillizza explained an ad on June 26, 2007:

The longer ad is more strictly biographical, detailing Obama's work as a community organizer, his standout years at Harvard Law School and his eventual return to community organizing. Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, says in the ad that Obama's decision to bypass wealth on Wall Street for a job organizing at the community level was "absolutely inspiring."

A Post reader could have found an account of Obama’s election as president of the Harvard Law Review in The Washington Post Magazine on August 12, 2007. Liza Mundy wrote about 1,000 words on this narrowly-focused event to explain how “it was at Harvard Law School that Obama's political skills -- and aspirations -- would emerge rather dramatically.” That's the only attempt at a view of Obama at law school.

More commonly, it's thrown around like currency. On December 14, 2007, there is Obama booster Kevin Merida, quoting from the memoir, as usual:

But it is also true that Obama, after his election as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review, wrote a 442-page memoir, published in 1995, that deeply explores his father's absence. It is rich with dialogue, precise recollections and emotion-laden self-analysis. It concludes with several chapters about his visit to Kenya, where he meets siblings, aunts, uncles, his grandmother and his father's ex-wives, and he finally understands the turmoil that consumed his father's life. At the end of the book, Obama is sitting between the graves of his father and paternal grandfather, weeping.

Or Obama’s credential was used as a club. See Post columnist Steven Pearlstein on February 22, 2008:

We're talking here about a former president of the Harvard Law Review. Have you ever met the people who get into Harvard Law School? You might not choose them as friends or lovers or godparents to your children, but -- trust me on this -- there aren't many lightweights there. And Obama was chosen by all the other overachievers as top dog. Compared with the current leader of the free world, this guy is Albert Einstein.

After Harvard Law School, Obama could have pursued a career that involved contact only with hypereducated brainiacs like him. But by working as a community organizer and in state politics, he chose a life that put him among ordinary folk. The elitist label is ridiculous.

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- See more at: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2015/02/12/his-election-washpost-never-probed-candidate-obamas-college-years-scott#sthash.VYrNKOu8.dpuf

The Washington Post published a 2,223-word story on Thursday's front page on the college career of Scott Walker -- it ended abruptly without a graduation. One obvious question: when did the Post publish a long story on candidate Barack Obama’s undergraduate college years before he was elected in 2008? The answer: They didn’t.

Obama attended Occidental College in California for two years and earned his degree in the Ivy League at Columbia University in New York City. But that apparently wasn't considered newsworthy.

A Nexis search of Obama and “Occidental” found one mention in a Sunday Outlook piece in 2007 and one mention in 2008. On February 11, 2007, it came up in a Sunday Outlook section piece titled “A Rusty Toyota, a Mean Jump Shot, Good Ears.” Occidental’s basketball coach Mike Zinn was quoted as saying “Barry was the same in victory or defeat -- even-tempered. You could sense that the sport and competition were important, but once the season was over, it was time to focus again on academic issues.”

In 2008, it was a gushy story by Post reporter Kevin Merida on August 25, the first day of the Democratic convention. The headline was “A Place in Between; In a Nation Where Race Has Long Carried Polarizing Implications, the Mixed Parentage Of Barack Obama Opens a Bridge to Changes in Our Language -- and Thinking.”

But Merida – now the paper’s managing editor – didn’t do any reporting on Obama’s college years. He merely quoted from Obama’s memoir.

In "Dreams From My Father," Obama poses the question that would hover over his post-adolescent life: "Where did I belong?" He was two years from graduation at Columbia University and felt "like a drunk coming out of a long, painful binge," he writes, with no idea what he was going to do with his future or even where he would live. He had put Hawaii in the rear-view mirror and could no longer imagine settling there. Africa? It was too late to claim his father's native land as his own.

"And if I had come to understand myself as a black American, and was understood as such, that understanding remained unanchored to place," Obama writes. "What I needed was a community, I realized, a community that cut deeper than the common despair that black friends and I shared when reading the latest crime statistics, or the high fives I might exchange on the a basketball court. A place where I could put down stakes and test my commitments."

In searching for a place to anchor, Obama transferred from Occidental College in Los Angeles to Columbia in New York, a period of his life that has not been well-examined. "I figured that if there weren't any more black students at Columbia than there were at Oxy, I'd at least be in the heart of a true city, with black neighborhoods in close proximity."

Obama writes that he was more like black students who had grown up in the suburbs, "kids whose parents had already paid the price of escape." Except he had not grown up in Compton or Watts, he points out, and had nothing to escape "except my own inner doubt."

The same thing happens when you search for Obama within 20 words of “Columbia University.”

On December 27, 2007, Merida glossed over it in a Jesse Jackson passage: “Obama was a recent graduate of Columbia University when Jackson launched his first campaign, and once told Jackson that he was inspired watching him on television debating Walter Mondale and Gary Hart. Now, Obama is trying to carve out a legacy of his own.”

There’s Merida in August of 2008, and then on October 17, 2008, there was a fleeting mention of Columbia, in an Eli Saslow story on Obama’s taste for solitude: “He had always guarded his space, once living in such seclusion as a student at Columbia University that when his mother visited his barren New York apartment, she chastised him for being ‘monklike.’”

After the election, there was more of the same on the editorial page on December 14, 2008 in a David Ignatius column:

Barack Obama wrote in "Dreams From My Father" of his days as a student at Occidental College, groping for his political identity: "We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Frantz Fanon, Eurocentrism and patriarchy."

Don’t you think the voters would have liked to know if young Obama was into terrorist-inspiring thinkers like Frantz Fanon and had a radical anti-Western problem with “Eurocentrism and patriarchy?” Ignatius thought exploring that passage is "silly." No one needs to know what Obama thought in 1981! (But the Post thinks you need to know Romney cut a kid's hair on the quad in 1965.)

PS: The Post had a little more interest in the “Harvard Law School” part of his resume, mostly as a sign of Obama’s belonging in the elite. Post political reporter Chris Cillizza explained an ad on June 26, 2007:

The longer ad is more strictly biographical, detailing Obama's work as a community organizer, his standout years at Harvard Law School and his eventual return to community organizing. Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, says in the ad that Obama's decision to bypass wealth on Wall Street for a job organizing at the community level was "absolutely inspiring."

A Post reader could have found an account of Obama’s election as president of the Harvard Law Review in The Washington Post Magazine on August 12, 2007. Liza Mundy wrote about 1,000 words on this narrowly-focused event to explain how “it was at Harvard Law School that Obama's political skills -- and aspirations -- would emerge rather dramatically.” That's the only attempt at a view of Obama at law school.

More commonly, it's thrown around like currency. On December 14, 2007, there is Obama booster Kevin Merida, quoting from the memoir, as usual:

But it is also true that Obama, after his election as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review, wrote a 442-page memoir, published in 1995, that deeply explores his father's absence. It is rich with dialogue, precise recollections and emotion-laden self-analysis. It concludes with several chapters about his visit to Kenya, where he meets siblings, aunts, uncles, his grandmother and his father's ex-wives, and he finally understands the turmoil that consumed his father's life. At the end of the book, Obama is sitting between the graves of his father and paternal grandfather, weeping.

Or Obama’s credential was used as a club. See Post columnist Steven Pearlstein on February 22, 2008:

We're talking here about a former president of the Harvard Law Review. Have you ever met the people who get into Harvard Law School? You might not choose them as friends or lovers or godparents to your children, but -- trust me on this -- there aren't many lightweights there. And Obama was chosen by all the other overachievers as top dog. Compared with the current leader of the free world, this guy is Albert Einstein.

After Harvard Law School, Obama could have pursued a career that involved contact only with hypereducated brainiacs like him. But by working as a community organizer and in state politics, he chose a life that put him among ordinary folk. The elitist label is ridiculous.

Like this article?

Get more like this in your inbox for free!

- See more at: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2015/02/12/his-election-washpost-never-probed-candidate-obamas-college-years-scott#sthash.VYrNKOu8.dpuf

The Washington Post published a 2,223-word story on Thursday's front page on the college career of Scott Walker -- it ended abruptly without a graduation. One obvious question: when did the Post publish a long story on candidate Barack Obama’s undergraduate college years before he was elected in 2008? The answer: They didn’t.

Obama attended Occidental College in California for two years and earned his degree in the Ivy League at Columbia University in New York City. But that apparently wasn't considered newsworthy.

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